Hundreds of New Customers Moving to SAP HANA on POWER | SAP Innovation Forum 2017

Fast moving and changing world requires fast and flexible IT. Columnar based in-memory databases are one part of that solution. SAP’s in-memory database HANA was announced on IBM POWER platform a year and half again. Since announcement hundreds of customers have decided to move to HANA on POWER.

There are multiple reasons for customers to move to HANA on POWER, but I will pick up the three most important ones.

1. Flexible

HANA on POWER provides flexibility that is new to HANA systems. You can increase resources based on your needs. Not based on power of two. Without changing the physical server you have bought. And, you can also decrease if you need and want. HANA is not all the world. So you can run HANA just as one workload among others. HANA, DB2, Oracle, MariaDB, application servers, web servers and all in one physical server. Same time. Production and test. All in one.

2. Scalable

Since 1990 when POWER was announced it has been the performance leader. Today it is truer than ever. POWER processor cores are over two times faster than others. Also in SAP HANA environment POWER beats others. Power Systems scales up to 32 TB of memory but you can start small (SAP support min 128GB memory in production) and grow big.

3. Risk free

While HANA is moving to more and more critical use also the hardware platform has to be designed more robust. As consultant studies and customer experiences show IBM Power Systems are the most reliable servers on planet, right after IBM z System. There are reasons why they are the most reliable servers. One example important in HANA use is the redundant memory. As HANA use a lot of memory also memory errors tend to be more common. Power Systems are protected against that.

Another form of risk is how to predict how much of capacity you will need next three years. This risk is much smaller with Power Systems. As you can change the HANA sizing during your project and production phase you don’t have to predict correctly beforehand. In the fast moving world that is important feature.

In changing and fast moving world Power Systems make life easier, especially in little bit challenging HANA environment. If you think HANA, think POWER. Take next step and check if you are ready for HANA.